This part of the year is about catching up with the certifications I need to finish. It’s also about the pending ones I need to get re-certified. The main one that I had to handle was the AWS Practitioner for this year.
Good thing is, I don’t have to go through the reading for getting certified. But, I have mixed feelings about the gamification of the re-certification. You get an email from AWS training that you are up for re-certification, it is free for the practitioner one. As well you get a 50% discount for the SCA. This is good, incentives to get your other certification, re-certified too.
Once you start the game, it takes a lot of time for me to understand my tasks. I struggle to know what I am supposed to do. Complicated rules and strategies was the overview I got. One end, I was thinking I should just let the certificate expire and do the exam.
It was a terrible way to know that, I was really bad at using keyboard for gaming. But once you get the hang of it, I really liked it. You get a 3-hour window to work on your assignment. You then take steps to finish each exercise.
In a day, with full-time work etc, I managed to catch up one to two assignments. But the Sandbox lets you do more interesting things. When you work on the Maria DB exercise, you can write small Java code. This code will connect and populate the Database.
In all another 3 years of certification done, and 50% coupon for the SCA. Good luck!!
Sathish Jayapal 